\u200bElectric Ireland Leinster minor hurling championship, Round 4<\/p>\n
Westmeath 3-18 Offaly 2-14<\/p>\n
Laois 2-17 Antrim 1-18<\/p>\n
By Paul Keane<\/p>\n
Westmeath and Laois have grabbed the two golden tickets to Tier 1 hurling in the Electric Ireland Leinster MHC.<\/p>\n
And both counties had to fight to the very end to come out on top in tense Round 4 ties that decided which teams would advance from Phase 1 of the competition to the Phase 2, Tier 1 group section.<\/p>\n
Westmeath, who previously defeated Kerry, will take huge heart from their Round 4 win having coughed up first half goals to Offaly’s Jack Collins and Joe Furey to trail by 0-9 to 2-10 at the interval.<\/p>\n
Two goals from Eoghan Beehan in the space of 60 seconds amounted to a sensational response from Westmeath in the third quarter, nudging them 2-11 to 2-10 ahead at that stage.<\/p>\n
The sides were level twice before Westmeath pushed ahead with points from Conor Raleigh and Conor Williams.<\/p>\n
Aidan Doyle wrapped up a hugely significant win for Westmeath with their third goal three minutes into stoppage time.<\/p>\n
Laois, who’d also beaten Kerry as well as Kildare, conceded the first four points of their tie against Antrim but battled back quickly to lead by 1-2 to 0-4 after Ois\u00edn Gilligan’s 10th minute goal.<\/p>\n
LJ Cuddy, who scored 1-10 overall, registered the second Laois goal to leave them narrowly ahead at the break, 2-7 to 1-9.<\/p>\n
Cuddy, Bobby O’Connor and Luke Hynes weighed in with second half points to make sure Laois stayed just about ahead in a tense tussle.<\/p>\n
Jay Gault was the Antrim goalscorer and there were tidy points throughout the game from rising Saffrons stars Ois\u00edn McLaren, who top scored for the visitors with 0-11 in Portlaoise, James McGarry, Eunan Curry and Connlaodh McNaughton.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u200bElectric Ireland Leinster minor hurling championship, Round 4 Westmeath 3-18 Offaly 2-14 Laois 2-17 Antrim 1-18 By Paul…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":394212,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-394211","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394211\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/394212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}